Odds and Ends — 25 October 2022
Unrelated to that battle, but a Splinterlands mystery the answer to which has eluded me is why do people use Quix in the Up Close & Personal rule set? Okay, maybe to be able to put Dragon splinter monsters into the fight, but why waste the -1 Ranged Attack buff? And let’s face it, -1 Speed is a bit of a gamble based on what an opponent might play, it’s just not as helpful as a +1 Speed buff.
Even more unrelated, but I despise the Noxious Fumes rule set. Particularly when it’s combined with the Back to Basics rule set. Die, just die. They’re dead, Dave. They’re all dead.
Another Splinterlands pet peeve is when you go to open a pack, the teeth chatter for a long time, and then you get a message saying to not re-try it, but never getting to see what the pack contained:
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, and Debt:
MakerDAO Members Support Founder's ‘Endgame’ Plan to Break Up into MetaDAOs, $2.1B of Transfers
With global currency markets in turmoil, could bitcoin provide portfolio insurance? In this post, we attempt to answer this question and examine how a strong dollar could impact global currency markets. Read now: https://t.co/ijnU3CewWn
— Fidelity Digital Assets (@DigitalAssets) October 18, 2022
Web3 grows in online searches as interest in Bitcoin declines: Google Trends
Online searches for the term “Bitcoin dead” reached an all-time high owing to peak anxiety among investors amid ongoing selloffs at the time.
Bitcoin dead searches might be a bullish capitulation indicator?
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
Controversial new research suggests SARS-CoV-2 bears signs of genetic engineering
Any conclusion that Sars-Cov-2 was engineered will be hotly contested. China denies the virus came from a Chinese lab, and has asked for investigations into whether it may have originated in America. Dr Washburne and his colleagues say their predictions are testable. If a progenitor genome to Sars-Cov-2 is found in the wild with restriction sites that are the same, or intermediate, it would raise the chances that this pattern evolved by chance.
Any widely supported conclusion that the virus was genetically engineered would have profound ramifications, both political and scientific. It would put in a new light the behavior of the Chinese government in the early days of the outbreak, particularly its reluctance to share epidemiological data from those days. It would also raise questions about what was known, when, and by whom about the presumably accidental escape of an engineered virus. For now, this is a first draft of science, and needs to be treated as such. But the scrutineers are already at work.
Politics:
Trump Plans to Challenge the 2022 Elections
In recent months, Trump has convened a series of in-person meetings and conference calls to discuss laying the groundwork to challenge the 2022 midterm election results… In these conversations, pro-Trump groups, attorneys, Republican Party activists, and MAGA diehards often discuss the type of scorched-earth legal tactics they could deploy.
And they’ve gamed out scenarios for how to aggressively challenge elections, particularly ones in which a winner is not declared on Election Night. If there’s any hint of doubt about the winners, the teams plan to wage aggressive court campaigns and launch a media blitz. Trump himself set the blueprint for this on Election Night 2020, when — with the race far from decided — he went on national television to declare: ‘Frankly, we did win this election.’
Bolsonarro Wants to Criminalize Polls That Are Wrong
President Jair Bolsonaro and conservative lawmakers in Brazil are trying to make it illegal to publish polls that later do not match the election results.
Disruptions in Arizona and Nevada will Reverberate
The concentration of pivotal races in Arizona and Nevada is astounding. Viewed in terms of individual voter power, I can’t recall anything like it. And election deniers on the ballot will compound the impact in 2024 and beyond.
Two Senate races in these states are central to both parties’ plans for 2023. They both show margins that are well within the polling error we’ve seen in the last few elections. In addition, Arizona and Nevada are home to no fewer than 7 competitive congressional races. In Nevada alone, the Cook Political Report sees 3 out of 4 Congressional races are “lean“ or closer. With a current 50-50 Senate and 220-212 House, these races are critical.
Beyond the usual questions of political control, on the ballot are the capacity to hold honestly administered elections at all.
In Detroit, Why There's No Black Democrat on the Ballot for Congress
Bolsonarro Ally Lobbed Grenades at Police
A Brazilian politician attacked federal police officers seeking to arrest him in his home on Sunday, prompting an hours-long siege that caused alarm and a scramble for a response at the highest level of government.
Roberto Jefferson, a former lawmaker and an ally of President Jair Bolsonaro, fired a rifle at police and threw grenades, wounding two officers in the rural municipality Comendador Levy Gasparian, in Rio de Janeiro state. He said in a video message sent to supporters on WhatsApp that he refused to surrender, though by early evening he was in custody.
Ukraine’s surprise attack on Putin’s ‘miracle’ bridge is more than just a military loss for Russia
Sure, it makes sense that Russia is rightfully up there, and it’s pathetically sad that the U.S. doesn’t have more icebreakers. But China? It would be a strategic blunder to let them gain a toehold in the Arctic. And why no mention of Canada, Norway, Iceland or Denmark, the other countries of the Arctic Ocean?
The Effort to Break America’s Elections
The system tolerated claims of widespread fraud for years in part because the effects were limited in scope or abstract. America’s elections are a mishmash of local administrators and tools, varying state laws and differing political outcomes. It’s imperfect both in general and at the local level, but it is distributed in a way that people could retain confidence in their own elections even if they were skeptical of them broadly — or, say, in heavily Black cities like Philadelphia, far from where they lived.
In the Trump era, doubt rooted in false claims of fraud has infected those local systems. By design. A rickety process dependent on old bureaucracy and volunteers has come under attack from both the outside and the inside, both nationally and at the county level. As the midterm elections loom, we see increasing reports of an effort to overwhelm elections systems and break confidence in their reported results with an obvious desired outcome: Seizing power whatever those results say.
Containing China Is Biden’s Explicit Goal
Imagine that a superpower declared war on a great power and nobody noticed. Joe Biden this month launched a full-blown economic war on China — all but committing the US to stopping its rise — and for the most part, Americans did not react.
To be sure, there is Russia’s war on Ukraine and inflation at home to preoccupy attention. But history is likely to record Biden’s move as the moment when US-China rivalry came out of the closet. America is now pledged to do everything short of fighting an actual war to stop China’s rise.
It is not clear that corporate America, or its foreign counterparts, have fully digested what is about to hit them.
This cannot be. Trumpists have repeatedly said that Biden is a Chinese tool.
U.S. charges Chinese nationals with schemes to steal info, punish critics and recruit spies
The Justice Department on Monday unsealed charges in three separate cases accusing more than a dozen defendants, most of them Chinese officials, of participating in schemes to repatriate critics of the Chinese government, obtain secret information about a U.S. investigation into a Chinese telecom firm and recruit spies to act as agents of the Chinese regime in the U.S.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the charges alongside FBI Director Chris Wray and top Justice Department officials. Ten of the 13 individuals charged in the cases are Chinese officials, Wray said.
Marco Rubio Canvasser, a Notorious White Supremacist, Was Beaten in Miami Area
Rubio tweeted that "four animals" beat a man who was campaigning for him simply because he's Republican. That doesn't appear to be what actually happened.
Serendipity:
Man Secretly Lowered Town’s Water Fluoride
The longtime water superintendent for a small town in Vermont has resigned in protest after local officials ordered him to restore the town’s water to the state’s standard for fluoride levels—which he had been secretly and unilaterally lowering for years due to his own personal anti-fluoride beliefs.
And his righteous, five-page resignation letter offered yet another bombshell in the small-town water scandal that has made national headlines in recent weeks. He asserted that he had been surreptitiously lowering the town’s fluoride levels for much longer than previously known—for over a decade rather than the nearly four years officials had previously disclosed.
She survived a mass shooting — then created a graphic novel to help others
